Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft over use of paywalled articles

The Seattle Times and Newsday have sued OpenAI and Microsoft in the Southern District of New York, alleging the companies scraped paywalled content and used it to train ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and the AI-powered Bing, Mashable reported on Friday.

The publishers claim the chatbots could reproduce entire passages and closely paraphrase reporters' work, and they are asking the court to order destruction of copies of the material and of training datasets or models that incorporate it, Reuters reported.

"We feel strongly that we must defend our content — which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce — from being used without our consent or compensation," Seattle Times president and CEO Alan Fisco wrote to employees.

OpenAI said it uses publicly available material grounded in fair use. Microsoft said it was surprised by the suit but willing to "sit down and explore solutions."